Surprise! Masks Don’t Work Against Respiratory Viruses
The Newest, Highest Quality Science on the topic Affirms What We Already Knew
The newest study on mask effectiveness from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews has gotten a ton of attention recently and for good reason. Therefore, my post today will not dwell too much on the study itself, but rather on the topic of why. Why was such a useless intervention (masks) pushed so aggressively on the population and why did so many people not only go along with the charade but also take on the “virtuous” mission of being the obedient authoritarian and force masks on other people.
Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews
For those of you not familiar with the Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews journal, it contains peer-reviewed systematic reviews authored by members of the Cochrane Collaboration and available via The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. They are widely recognized as the gold standard in medical systematic reviews due to the rigorous methodology used.
To address any financial conflicts of interest or bias, the members of the Collaboration are volunteers.
A journal’s impact factor is essentially a measure of how much impact studies published in a given journal have on researchers. The Impact Factor of the Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews is rated 19 out of 172 medical journals, and they are considered the leading journal for systemic reviews in healthcare.
Additionally, systemic reviews/meta-analysis studies are considered to sit as the highest level of scientific evidence, and this is the type of study that the Cochrane Database publishes.
Now that we’ve established that this journal is of exceptionally high reputation and quality, let’s have a brief look at the masking study itself.
Study: Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses (Review)
This is an updated publication of an ongoing systemic review and contains the data from 78 randomized clinical trials (RCT) which totals 610,872 participants. Since the studies last publication in 2020, this recent update added data from 11 new RCTs, 6 of which took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The author’s conclusions are:
So, the pooled results did not show benefit for reducing viral infection, and N95/P2 respirators were no better than surgical masks. And while not mentioned in this paper, we know that cloth masks should be even more useless than surgical masks.
Masking fanatics will simply say that the results are of low certainty/confidence, so this study doesn’t undoubtedly prove that masks aren’t effective against respiratory viruses so we should wear them anyways just in case they actually do provide some protection. Better safe than sorry right.
Such a statement is partially correct, and the researchers openly admit this in their conclusion.
But the mask fanatics miss one important thing. The precautionary principal: “you should do nothing unless you have reasonable evidence that the benefits outweigh the harms”.
So, while there existed little evidence that masks may be detrimental, there was also no existing evidence that masks had any benefit against respiratory infection and spread so the precautionary principal was not satisfied and they should not have even been recommended for general community use, never mind coercive mandates.
This is exactly what the lead author stated during an interview following the publication of this review:
Why Was Mask Mania Promoted by Mainstream Media and Governments?
Did you catch the meaning of the segue meme?
It’s simple, all the powers that be knew masks didn’t work against COVID-19 but they sure were a great symbol, or talisman, for fear, virtue signaling, and compliance, all of which made people more willing to…you guessed it, get injected with an experimental, rushed to market pharmaceutical product labelled as a vaccine. And the more people that wore them, the better, so let’s make them mandatory.
It’s either that, or the government just wanted to appear as though it was doing something useful when it had no other options. It’s likely a combination of both. But sadly, as more information is coming out about how the pandemic response was driven by the military, I’m even more sure it wasn’t just a “we better just do something” scenario. It was at least partially a tactic of a larger psyop of compliance.
I’m growing more concerned by the day that more people aren’t furious with what happened over the last 3.5 years. I’m still hearing calls for amnesty for the leaders and experts who were responsible, and no apologies to those of us who made some hard, unpopular, ethical, and moral choices that ended up being correct. What I get is something more like:
As many of you probably are, I have been so utterly confused for so long as to why more people couldn’t see something was very wrong about the response to COVID-19 right from the start. I don’t see myself as any more intelligent than the average person, but I was somehow resistant to much of the propaganda and coercive measures and terrified of authoritarian government control.
I have felt like this for a lot longer than 18 months now.
I’m reading 1984 for the first time since high school and the comparisons that can be made between the “Party’s” tactics in the book and what our governments have done since the start of the pandemic is chilling. Such a comparison should be nowhere close to possible in a so-called western democracy.
It’s clear that our governments have been slowly nudging in this direction for decades, but I was blissfully ignorant of this until the pandemic hit. However, in a fortunately, unfortunate way, those wishing for more authoritarian, centralized control vastly overplayed their cards with COVID-19 and pushed many people right through the curtain that blinded us from some harsh realities. Those of us now on this side of the curtain are increasingly pulling at the threads and eventually the whole curtain will fall.
More people are taking off the blinders, and while those who are responsible may never be held responsible more people will at least know the truth and never blindly trust the government or “authority” figures again.
Be positive, keep seeking truth, writing truth, speaking truth, and if your life prevents you from expressing what you know to be the truth, I’m told that remaining free in your own mind can be the biggest act of defiance.
If you enjoyed this post and don’t want to commit to a monthly membership, please consider a one-time tip by clicking THIS LINK or the picture below. Thank you for your readership!!